Hey all, as a student who has just recently become interested in archaeology, I'm curious if there is strong belief in the archaeological community that great, "legendary" sites are still out there to be found. By great, I mean something along the lines of King Tut's tomb, or perhaps Bingham's rediscovery of Machu Picchu. What are your thoughts?

Undoubtedly, LIDAR imaging is picking up literally hundreds of sites in the jungles all over Central America. It's also picking up sites in Egypt that have never been known so it's possible we might find extremely pristine sites.

I'm still trying to find the source on the Egypt LIDAR stuff. There are one of two possibilities, One, I have the wrong country and it's somewhere else in the Middle East or North Africa or, two, I'm completely off my rocker and somehow conjured up the whole thing in my head. But I thought I read something about LIDAR studies near Karnak and Luxor, finding smaller pyramids farther away from the Nile. I'll keep looking.

Think of it this way, modern humans have been around 150,000 years. We get everywhere and we leave shit everywhere. Advancing science and technology (particularly satellite imaging) are making it easier (and cheaper) to see just how much.

In regards to "amazing" if you mean undisturbed more impressive looking, yes. If it's not been disturbed in a long time it means nobody has been there in a long time, so its most likely forgotten and somewhere hard to get, enter satellites, hello archaeology.

If you mean amazing as in will provide lots of interesting data, then even more so as this technology is also very good at detecting sites that are almost invisible otherwise.

I agree that big finds might not always reveal the most, but they certainly seem to get the most attention, both in and outside of the field. I guess in that way there's an advantage to finding the next big site.

Hell yeah. Ice patch archaeology (especially in North America) is super cool, and from what I understand researchers have really only brushed the surface. There are many high altitude, isolated sites which have very well preserved artifacts melting out, as well as trees. So with these artifacts come C-14 dates and eventual chronologies, which just makes everything so much cooler.

By great, I mean something along the lines of King Tut's tomb, or perhaps Bingham's rediscovery of Machu Picchu. What are your thoughts?

My first thought? You have an exceptionally narrow (and somewhat uninformed) view of what is "great" or "amazing" in terms of archaeological discoveries.

Your definition of "great" is actually the definition for "flashy" or "ready for the History Channel," which is not the same thing as "an amazing site."

Most people have never heard of the truly great sites - as in, sites that really expanded our understanding of human history and the development of our culture(s). They just know about what was discovered because of / at those sites.

I think that's a fair point, though I'm inclined to say that as a very new student of archaeology it's unsurprising that I haven't heard of any great finds outside of the really famous ones (i.e. the ones on the History Channel).

Can you give me an example of some of these "truly great sites," the ones that have really contributed to the field?

For example, sites like Cloudsplitter or Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, or Riverton in Illinois, or Hayes in Tennessee, where some of the earliest examples of eastern North American domesticates have been found, helped to define and redefine how agriculture in the Eastern Woodlands was adopted and took hold.

Koster (Illinois), or Icehouse Bottom (Tennessee), or St. Albans (West Virginia), or Hardaway (North Carolina) are all examples of deeply stratified sites that gave us important chronological information - stratified sequences of projectile points that helped to define the cultural chronology for the surrounding regions.

Monte Verde, Paisley Cave, Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Cactus Hill, Gault and Buttermilk Creek / Debrah L. Friedkin are a few sites with pretty convincing and reasonably well documented evidence of earlier groups of people in the Americas before Clovis.

The thing is, though, that talking about these sites as though they're "great" and others are not ignores the way archaeology works.

We don't look for the "great" sites. We look for information in any site, and nearly every site contains some bit of information that helps us along the way. I'm involved in a site right now that may well end up as one of a very few points on the map of early domesticates in the Southeastern United States. It started out as a nearly inconsequential eroded riverbank that we started working on because it was there and was in danger of eroding into the river. It's only becoming more important now because we've spent several years working on the stuff that we've dug out of it.

Framing real archaeology in the dichotomy of "great sites" or "other sites" ignores the goals of archaeology. Most people in the past lived at all of the other sites, not the few seemingly "great" ones.

We use the bigger ones to help inform about the smaller and more numerous sites, but we often find that we get more information to help us contextualize the bigger sites from the smaller ones. Case in point - look at the work with Cahokia out in the US Midwest. Much of the information for how that site is to be understood is coming from smaller sites located in the region around Cahokia.

Today is the last day of a field project I have been a part of for the last 11 months in downtown Miami, Florida.. and by downtown, I mean the mouth of the river downtown. Skyscrapers on 3 sides with the south side over looking the mouth of the Miami river.

We uncovered the Royal palm foundation from 1896.

Fort Dallas artifacts and features. 1830s.

Spanish olive jar fragments and lead artifacts. 1500s.

A tequesta Indian village. 2000 years ago.

If this type of stuff doesn't interest you than just maybe all the amazing sites have been found.